Most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the MtGox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011. As a result, MtGox operated at fractional reserve for years (knowingly or not), and was practically depleted of bitcoins by 2013....

I'm very curious if the Gox investigations are going to reveal that their insolvency has something to do with the 2011 hack. I think one possibility that people are overlooking is that perhaps the attacker snagged a whole bunch of code off Gox's servers, and then analyzed it later and found exploitable bugs that allowed the attacker(s) to subsequently bleed Gox over time.

Peter's is a good theory. in fact, i take it one step further. i think it was probably gvt agents who took it down from 17.5 to 0.002 at the time.

what a crazy way to accumulate coins, if it was indeed just a hacker. if he had really stole source code, he would have just bled 100 coin lots over the next 3 yrs as was apparently done according to WizSec. no drama. i remember quite vividly watching the attack take place real time on what was then used, Sierra Charts. it was a straight down spiral of the price with no intervening buys, just selling. it reminded me of watching the Bear Stearns chart plummet in real time back in 2008. it's indescribable seeing such a thing happen right before your very eyes. it was so public and so obvious that the guy Kevin got identified immediately for having bought 259684 BTC for under $3000:

no, my bet is on gvt agents who were trying to destroy Bitcoin. this board was covered with obvious trolls even back then and mtgox had just captured the public's attention for the first time with the run to 32. since then, we have found out an astounding number of facts about NSA's unabashed unconstitutional actions to invade privacy and perform sabotage such as Stuxnet, Gemalto, Prism, Merkel's cellphone, etc, etc. The SR agents were methodical, ruthless, and matter of fact about stealing SR coins acting with impunity. doesn't seem to far a stretch that gvt agents would steal from mtgox while taking it down at the same time. it would explain the radio silence on the whole issue as well as an attempt to bury the truth forever.

Most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the MtGox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011. As a result, MtGox operated at fractional reserve for years (knowingly or not), and was practically depleted of bitcoins by 2013....

I'm very curious if the Gox investigations are going to reveal that their insolvency has something to do with the 2011 hack. I think one possibility that people are overlooking is that perhaps the attacker snagged a whole bunch of code off Gox's servers, and then analyzed it later and found exploitable bugs that allowed the attacker(s) to subsequently bleed Gox over time.

Peter's is a good theory. in fact, i take it one step further. i think it was probably gvt agents who took it down from 17.5 to 0.002 at the time.

what a crazy way to accumulate coins, if it was indeed just a hacker. if he had really stole source code, he would have just bled 100 coin lots over the next 3 yrs as was apparently done according to WizSec. no drama. i remember quite vividly watching the attack take place real time on what was then used, Sierra Charts. it was a straight down spiral of the price with no intervening buys, just selling. it reminded me of watching the Bear Stearns chart plummet in real time back in 2008. it's indescribable seeing such a thing happen right before your very eyes. it was so public and so obvious that the guy Kevin got identified immediately for having bought 259684 BTC for under $3000:

no, my bet is on gvt agents who were trying to destroy Bitcoin. this board was covered with obvious trolls even back then and mtgox had just captured the public's attention for the first time with the run to 32. since then, we have found out an astounding number of facts about NSA's unabashed unconstitutional actions to invade privacy and perform sabotage such as Stuxnet, Gemalto, Prism, Merkel's cellphone, etc, etc. The SR agents were methodical, ruthless, and matter of fact about stealing SR coins with impunity. doesn't seem to far a stretch that gvt agents would steal from mtgox while taking it down at the same time. it would explain the radio silence on the whole issue as well as an attempt to bury the truth forever.

Nice theory, I like it. Bitcoin responded with distributing trade over hundreds of bourses.

no, my bet is on gvt agents who were trying to destroy Bitcoin. this board was covered with obvious trolls even back then and mtgox had just captured the public's attention for the first time with the run to 32. since then, we have found out an astounding number of facts about NSA's unabashed unconstitutional actions to invade privacy and perform sabotage such as Stuxnet, Gemalto, Prism, Merkel's cellphone, etc, etc. The SR agents were methodical, ruthless, and matter of fact about stealing SR coins with impunity. doesn't seem to far a stretch that gvt agents would steal from mtgox while taking it down at the same time. it would explain the radio silence on the whole issue as well as an attempt to bury the truth forever.

Would explain the persistent narrative about how the failure of Mt Gox still impacts the credibility of Bitcoin.

From a bitcoin perspective it seems self serving to cheer for currency crisis, but to my mind it appears to be the lesser of two evils. The Third option that nobody is talking about is a federal European union. I just can't see any member state willing to give up autonomy for "the good? of the union'

no, my bet is on gvt agents who were trying to destroy Bitcoin. this board was covered with obvious trolls even back then and mtgox had just captured the public's attention for the first time with the run to 32. since then, we have found out an astounding number of facts about NSA's unabashed unconstitutional actions to invade privacy and perform sabotage such as Stuxnet, Gemalto, Prism, Merkel's cellphone, etc, etc. The SR agents were methodical, ruthless, and matter of fact about stealing SR coins with impunity. doesn't seem to far a stretch that gvt agents would steal from mtgox while taking it down at the same time. it would explain the radio silence on the whole issue as well as an attempt to bury the truth forever.

If true this would be the biggest endorsement of bitcoin I could imagine. It would mean that despite the government's best efforts and resources, they could not identify any mechanism to attack bitcoin even in it's early days, and so had to resort to attacking 3rd party intermediaries and not bitcoin itself. This implies that the bitcoin distributed computer is already hardened against large scale attacks. Of course it also means that governments are already seeking methods to attack bitcoin, and if they can not stop the DAC, regulation becomes the next obvious choice.

From a bitcoin perspective it seems self serving to cheer for currency crisis, but to my mind it appears to be the lesser of two evils. The Third option that nobody is talking about is a federal European union. I just can't see any member state willing to give up autonomy for "the good? of the union'

Good article demonstrating the ongoing fiat monetary problems that will never go away while continuing to fester beneath the surface. My favorite quotes:

" The IMF is a rules-based institution, Lagarde said. While all options were available, she added: “It’s clearly not a course of action that could be recommended in the current situation.”

Until they're not.

" Athens is waiting for the final €7.2bn payment under the second rescue package, but it has been held up after the new radical leftwing-led government scrapped previous commitments to privatise state assets and cut welfare."

"One way to understand mining is that in return for doing transactions you get to add a direct deposit to yourself," Srinivasan said. "For a blockchain to exist, that token introduction needs to be there at least under the paradigm that we had."

Should such a system be capable of existing, he said, it hasn't been discovered.

"We think it's going to be bitcoin or nothing at the present time," he added.

"If we assume there are 10 million Google servers and each of these servers is running. You can multiply that through and you get about one petahash. If they turned off all their data centers and pointed them at bitcoin, they'd be less than 1% of the network," he continued."

"Are there legal issues? I think that was a reasonable concern in 2013, [but] I don't think that's a reasonable thing today," Srinivasan said.

From a bitcoin perspective it seems self serving to cheer for currency crisis, but to my mind it appears to be the lesser of two evils. The Third option that nobody is talking about is a federal European union. I just can't see any member state willing to give up autonomy for "the good? of the union'

I can't help but get giddy thinking of this house of cards so near to falling.

Guys, governments are structurally inefficient. Do you really think a bunch of bureaucrats could understand the potential of bitcoin back in 2011?

If governments were so smart and visionary, administered economy would work.

Yes I do, especially when it comes to threats in monetary matters. They've demonstrated this understanding many times in the past ; Von Nothaus for one.

Did you ever think that the NSA had the capabilities they have been shown to possess from the Snowden documents? And most experts agree that those documents released in 2013 are at least 2 years old. Cracking into mtgox would have been trivial for them.

You can't rule out some smart people get hired into 3-letter-agencies, for example.

You especially can't rule out smart criminals joining 3-letter-agencies for the express purpose of being able to line their own pockets under the colour of law.

Agreed. Politicians and bureaucrats may be nothing more than feudal court officials, which requires zero brain power. But spending $3,500,000,000,000 per year does buy you intelligence in various agencies.

Heck we already know that the CIA contacted Gavin and Satoshi in late-2010 / early-2011, so someone there noticed bitcoin's potential before most (or maybe any) of us.

Did you ever think that the NSA had the capabilities they have been shown to possess from the Snowden documents? And most experts agree that those documents released in 2013 are at least 2 years old. Cracking into mtgox would have been trivial for them.

For 30 years. It does not change a thing. We have the distributed blockchain with proof of work and block reward in the form of the currency itself. It looks easy now, but were not. It is an invention. They could not know.

For 30 years. It does not change a thing. We have the distributed blockchain with proof of work and block reward in the form of the currency itself. It looks easy now, but were not. It is an invention. They could not know.

Doesn't matter if Satoshi or the NSA wrote it. It's open source and had been inspected up the wazoo. It does what we think it does. And if it doesn't, we'll change it.

For 30 years. It does not change a thing. We have the distributed blockchain with proof of work and block reward in the form of the currency itself. It looks easy now, but were not. It is an invention. They could not know.

Doesn't matter if Satoshi or the NSA wrote it. It's open source and had been inspected up the wazoo. It does what we think it does.

It wasn't really surprising that the Japan economy turns out to be weak currently. Come with a bogous economic theory, put it in practise, and conclude that it is surprising that it didn't work. From the eating-hole of Haruhiko Kuroda:

no, my bet is on gvt agents who were trying to destroy Bitcoin. this board was covered with obvious trolls even back then and mtgox had just captured the public's attention for the first time with the run to 32. since then, we have found out an astounding number of facts about NSA's unabashed unconstitutional actions to invade privacy and perform sabotage such as Stuxnet, Gemalto, Prism, Merkel's cellphone, etc, etc. The SR agents were methodical, ruthless, and matter of fact about stealing SR coins with impunity. doesn't seem to far a stretch that gvt agents would steal from mtgox while taking it down at the same time. it would explain the radio silence on the whole issue as well as an attempt to bury the truth forever.

If true this would be the biggest endorsement of bitcoin I could imagine. It would mean that despite the government's best efforts and resources, they could not identify any mechanism to attack bitcoin even in it's early days, and so had to resort to attacking 3rd party intermediaries and not bitcoin itself. This implies that the bitcoin distributed computer is already hardened against large scale attacks. Of course it also means that governments are already seeking methods to attack bitcoin, and if they can not stop the DAC, regulation becomes the next obvious choice.

In another light, the senate hearings of Nov-2013 may have signified a capitulation after an unsuccessful covert attack. "We can't kill this thing let's begin efforts to coopt it into an unworkable regulatory framework", like they have done with electronic gold as money. bitcoin of course has effectively no targettable counter-parties at the network level.